OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 723 



traits of modern French thought : an appreciation of 

 the ideology of Plato, the study of which — as of the 

 whole of ancient philosophy — was stimulated and cul- 

 tivated in the eclectic school of Victor Cousin ; an equal 

 appreciation for the genuine teaching of Positivism, 

 enlarged by the evolutionary conceptions of Darwin, 

 Lamarck, and Spencer, To these, the main subjects 

 of his earlier studies, he has added a thorough know- 

 ledge of the original works of Kant as also of the 

 Neo-Kantian movement and of the writings of Lotze. 

 With such a large material to work on, his endeavour 

 lies in the direction of conciliating opposed tendencies 

 of thought, leaving aside the more extreme developments 

 which these several tendencies have led to. Though 

 he opposes what he terms the Idealist movement 

 with its modern doctrines, such as those of dis- 

 continuity and contingency, the heaven of ideas of 

 Plato still illuminates the whole of his thinking, which 

 aims at bringing these ideas down to the surface of this 

 earth. Though he disputes the one-sided mechanism, 

 automatism, and agnosticism of Spencer, Huxley, and 

 others, he stands firmly on an enlarged positivist basis 

 and shares with Comte and Spencer the interest which 

 they took in the great social question. Por the central 

 and leading principle he has coined the term Idees- 

 forces, a term which conveys a more definite notion in the 

 French language than it does in its German and English 

 renderings. To him Ideas — which term he uses in the 

 Cartesian sense, as meaning any mental presentation — 

 are active forces, and as such the counterpart in the inner 

 world of mechanical motion in the outer world ; for 



